◊
OPINION
◊
by Dovid Katz
◊
VILNIUS—It is never easy to determine with precision the point at which a bigot with a fancy degree should cease to be regarded as a fringer best ignored, and when the moment has arrived for a public alert. In that spirit of frank uncertainty, we offer a PDF of today’s email blast by a veteran mass-mailer whose geopolitical musings from Kaunas—he holds a master’s degree from Vytautas Magnus University—reflect a conspiracy theory about the war in Ukraine that has circulated since its onset, and is ridiculous enough for people far from the current European war zone to laugh off.
What many Westerners may not fully grasp, however, is how different the war feels psychologically, spiritually and empirically when one lives within plausible range of spillover or a follow-up invasion, with all the ensuing frustrations, including border closures that sever many people’s ties with friends and family a little farther east. This is especially true in the firmly EU-aligned states of liberated Eastern Europe that were once Soviet republics or satellites and now find themselves perilously close to the war zone. They are also home to large numbers of refugees from Ukraine, bringing first-hand accounts of the horrors of incessant attacks on apartment buildings and other civilian targets. Nor should one underestimate the lingering shock effect, within the European experience, of the February 2022 transition from political confrontation, propaganda and proxy conflict to full military invasion by a major nuclear power next door, one ruled by a ruthless and revanchist dictator.
Here in Eastern Europe, post-Soviet antisemitism has generally been nonviolent and has also been very different in content from its counterpart in Western Europe. The Western strain—sometimes violent—is often associated with sectors of the far left, with Middle Eastern politics, and with the grotesque habit of holding one’s Jewish neighbors somehow responsible for every policy and action of the Israeli government. The Eastern strain, by contrast—and this can still shock Western observers—is deeply rooted in far-right Second World War revisionism: the drive to “equalize” Nazism and Communism, to defame or even attempt to prosecute targets of Nazi genocide who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, while glorifying local Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators as anti-Soviet “freedom fighters.”
This journal has been fighting these interconnected battles for close to two decades, not least against ‘double genocide’ revisionism (including its emblematic 2008 Prague Declaration). At present, this includes efforts to erase from the Lithuanian forest the last surviving Jewish resistance fort, which now finds itself abutting the German army’s new eastern NATO brigade—as recently reported in Der Spiegel, but hitherto unmentioned in mainstream English-language media.
Much has changed here in Lithuania with the advent of the so-called Žemaitaitis phenomenon, named for the populist politician who served continuously in the Lithuanian parliament from 8 December 2009 until 29 April 2024, and, after an absence of some six and a half months, returned in November 2024 and remains a member today. His antics have attracted mainstream media attention, including from The New York Times.
In 2023, the year in which it dawned on him—no pun intended—to establish the populist Dawn of Nemunas (Nemuno Aušra) party, Žemaitaitis hit upon a politically potent synthesis of Eastern and Western varieties of antisemitism, as concisely illustrated by a 2023 Facebook post. New Western-derived fuel—antisemitism focused on Middle Eastern affairs—was added to the older Eastern variety, rooted in degradation of Holocaust victims and the urge to invert Holocaust history. This was a long-feared toxic combination.
Add to that the war in Ukraine, with the fears it has generated for physical security and economic stability, and Lithuania found itself with a successful politician whose party won 186,305 party-list votes (14.97%), placing third nationwide in the 13 October 2024 election and ultimately securing 20 seats in the 141-member Seimas. Scarcely a month later, on 11 November 2024 the party would be included in a Social Democrat-led coalition, where it remained until, after prolonged domestic and international criticism, the Social Democrats voted on 6 June 2026 to remove it, predictably supplying its populist leader with a fresh grievance to stir up his supporters.
That this happened under Social Democratic leadership was particularly painful for many of Lithuania’s longtime friends abroad, given that members of the party’s older guard had so valiantly stood up to the far right in the days of the Seventy Years Declaration. Further salt was rubbed into the wound this year when veteran Social Democratic figures became outspoken supporters of plans for a new convention center in the middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, where many thousands still lie buried.
Today’s email blast does not straightforwardly fit into all this as an incipient marker of a turn in serious politics. But it does contribute to the environment in which political and social shifts already under way can flourish: shifts recently fueled by the nearby war; by doubts about the future reliability of the mighty ally across the Atlantic (one whose Jewish minority remains a perennial object of antisemitic conspiracy theories); and now by a novel ruse that blames the victim—in this instance Ukraine—for the war, handily invoking the Jewish ethnicity of its elected president.
One mass email, however repellent, proves no general trend; the question is whether it is one more symptom of a changing regional landscape.
When those ingredients are thrown together with claims that Jews control the world’s media and recycled stereotypes about that minority’s presumed perfidy and financial power, the prospect of a resulting maelstrom of wilfully generated confusion and animus may merit some attention.